‘I will stay behind,’ Gwyn said, coming closer, his voice full of righteous anger. ‘I will kill the Magdan for what he did to my teacher. That will give you the time you need to—’
The boy fell face-first in the snow, and it took me a moment to realise what had happened: Kest had thrown him.
‘You’re still weak from the fever you suffered,’ he said dispassionately. ‘Your reflexes are slow, and even if you were in perfect health, you wouldn’t be one-tenth the fighter Morn is. He’d kill you without bothering to dismount.’
Gwyn rose to his feet, his sling already spinning in his hand. I caught a sudden motion out of the corner of my eye and watched the sling fall unceremoniously to the ground. Kest had knocked it from the young man’s hand with a snowball.
‘Enough,’ I told Kest. ‘Stop humiliating the boy. You’ve made your point.’
‘Good, then you and the others go on ahead. When Morn and his soldiers come, I’ll keep them busy and buy you a little more time.’
‘Forget it. I’m not leaving you here.’
‘Falcio, it’s the only way—’
The tinkling sound of Trin’s deeply annoying laughter caught me off-guard. ‘My, my, this is just like watching one of those lovely military plays about honour and duty.’
‘If we’re all going to die anyway,’ Brasti began, ‘does anyone mind if I kill Trin first?’
She put a hand on Filian’s chest to stop him from once again declaring his willingness to protect her no matter the cost, then went to Kest and standing up on her tiptoes, kissed him on the cheek. ‘It’s kind of you to offer, dear Kest, but it won’t work either, and you know it.’
‘What?’ Brasti said. ‘Why not?’
‘Because they don’t want Kest – they’ll either overrun him with sheer weight of numbers, or more likely, they’ll ignore him and keep right on after us. We need to give them a more tempting target to pursue.’
‘Which is?’
She took in a deep breath and let it out slowly. I think it was the first time I’d ever seen real sorrow in her eyes. ‘Me.’
‘No!’ Filian said, rushing to her. ‘No, you cannot—!’
Trin was right: Morn wasn’t worried about us – our escape would annoy him, that’s all – and he didn’t know who Filian was. But Trin? She commanded immense loyalty in Hervor and Orison . . . he couldn’t afford to lose her.
‘I’ll stay behind,’ she continued. ‘As soon as they’re within sight of me, I’ll ride as fast as I can – I’ll head for the hard ground to the north of here.’
‘They’ll catch you,’ I said.
‘Of course they will. But all I need to do is draw their pursuit long enough for the rest of you to escape.’
I found myself peering into her eyes, searching for the trick, the deceit. ‘This is suicide,’ I said at last.
‘Why, Falcio, I didn’t realise you cared.’
‘We’re wasting time,’ Kest said. ‘Whatever we’re going to do, we need to do it now.’
‘I’m not leaving her!’ Filian shouted.
‘Here, my darling,’ Trin said, and reached out to hug him. She caught my eyes and nodded faintly and I knew exactly what she wanted me to do. I took the sword I’d stolen and struck the back of Filian’s head with the pommel.
The boy fell like a sack of wheat into my arms. I handed him to Kest who lifted him back onto his horse. He took out a length of rope to start strapping him in place.
‘Take care of Filian,’ Trin said. ‘He really is a sweet boy.’
As soon as he was fast in the saddle, Kest made Gwyn mount up behind him, and he and Brasti started riding down the road. I climbed up onto Arsehole’s saddle, but found I couldn’t leave; I needed to try and understand what was driving Trin. ‘You’re going to die,’ I said. ‘The Magdan won’t risk losing you a second time.’
‘Perhaps,’ she said, ‘but I’m a survivor.’
Again I found myself looking into her eyes, convinced that I would see signs of trickery there, but I found nothing but fear mixed with determination. ‘Why?’ I asked at last.
‘I’ll never sit the throne of Tristia, Falcio: you know that. So what is left for a woman born and raised to rule yet denied all power, except to make that one last decision of consequence left to her?’ One corner of her mouth lifted. ‘I may still surprise you, Falcio. I’m not without my own tricks, and these barbarians are fools.’ She came over and reached up a hand to caress my cheek. ‘Go, my lovely tatter-cloak. Tell Filian . . . Well, I’m sure you’ll think of something suitably poetic.’
I pulled away from her and nudged Arsehole into motion. We pounded down the road that would lead us to Tristia and to Aramor. I was confused beyond all measure.
My world had stopped making sense.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The Boy and His Dog
We stopped sooner than we should have, Filian being too tired and too heartbroken to continue. A better man than I would have been sympathetic to his plight. A more practical one would have killed him.
‘You don’t like me, do you.’ He didn’t bother making it a question.
I stared at him, willing his mouth to tighten into a sneer or his chin to inch up into a haughty scowl, giving me the excuse to slap him across the face, but he was too smart – or too innocent – to provide me with the necessary provocation.
‘I don’t know you,’ I said at last.
‘And you don’t want to.’
I kicked at a mound, stubbing my toe on the broken branch concealed by the snow, then knelt to pick it up. ‘Find more of these,’ I said. ‘We need wood if we’re to have a fire.’
He did as he was told, staying close and often looking back to make sure I hadn’t left him alone in this wilderness. His entirely natural and sensible fear bothered me; no one raised by Patriana, Duchess of Hervor, had any business exhibiting normal human emotions.
More troubling was that I found myself making dark calculations: at fifteen paces away from me, with his attention focused on the ground in front of him, it would take me four seconds to bridge the distance between us. Even with my hands firmly at my sides, the urge to draw my rapier, to let that swift, fluid motion extend into a killing lunge, gnawed at me. The tip of the sword would slide so easily through the boy’s back, just to the left of his spine, and come out the other side with his heart’s blood dripping along the length of the blade.
I tried to shake the image away, but that made the bracer of throwing knives inside my coat rub against my chest, reminding me that I needn’t even get close to the boy to do the job; he’d stuck to the little path and there was a clear line between us, no trees or branches to shield him. My first throw would embed a knife between his shoulder blades – enough to incapacitate, not kill – but the second and third would finish the job. Aline would be crowned. The country would be safe. And Filian wasn’t facing me, so I wouldn’t even have to see his eyes when the light left them.
The vividness of my visions unsettled me and I didn’t know if it was the traditional Tristian aversion to shedding royal blood, or because despite all the violence in my life, I had never before contemplated the murder of an innocent.
Saint Birgid, where are you when I actually need someone to scold me for thinking a blade could solve all the world’s problems?
A polite cough pulled me back: Kest, alerting me to his presence, which I’d managed to miss entirely – a sure sign that I was unlikely to make a good assassin. The urge to yell at him for sneaking up on me quickly faded when his expression made it clear he’d not put any particular effort into moving silently; if I did bring it up, he’d just ask if I’d prefer that he clomp through the snow more loudly from now on.
One day I would find something that Kest Murrowson was bad at, and on that day all of Tristia would breathe a sigh of relief.
‘Any signs of pursuit
?’ I asked.
He shook his head. ‘Brasti and Gwyn went nearly a mile in each direction. No one is following us.’
‘So Trin was right: the Magdan doesn’t yet know who Filian is.’
‘So it would appear.’ Kest tilted his head as he watched me. ‘You’re troubled that Morn hasn’t sent any of his men after us.’
I sighed. I suppose the logic was simple enough: he had more than forty Greatcoats on his side, so Kest, Brasti and me escaping would make little difference to his master plan. ‘Is it possible that the world doesn’t actually revolve around us?’
Kest reached into his pack, pulled out a strip of dried beef and handed it to me. ‘I don’t know, but if it doesn’t, at least you could stop trying to carry it on your shoulders.’
I accepted the food although I wasn’t hungry and tried to do the same with the implied criticism. I was less successful at that. ‘Forty Greatcoats, Kest. How did I lose that many?’
It’s not Kest’s way to offer words of comfort, especially not platitudes – it doesn’t occur to him to consider someone’s feelings because, really, what difference would it make? The situation is what it is. ‘Forty-two, actually,’ he said.
Forty-two. Take the few who had come back to Aramor and those we knew were dead and forty-two amounted to just about everyone left. ‘Is that supposed to make me feel better?’
Kest shrugged. ‘They made a choice, Falcio, the same as you and Brasti and I do every day of our lives. Do we keep following the strange, winding path the King set us on, or do we allow ourselves the luxury of expediency and just kill our way to a better world?’
He made everything sound so simple: a straightforward choice. Go left or go right. Examine the evidence, analyse the testimony, weigh the truth as if it were little wooden blocks you could sit on either side of a scale and then either set a man free or sentence him to death.
‘I could do it, you know,’ I said, my eyes returning to Filian, who was walking towards us. ‘I could kill him right here and now and no one could stop me.’
‘Perhaps,’ Kest said, ‘but then you’d have a different problem.’
‘Just one? What would that be?’
He unslung his shield and before I even understood what he was doing he’d set it on his right arm and slammed me so hard in the chest I went flying back three feet and landed on my arse in the snow.
‘I’d have to arrest you,’ he said, slinging the shield back on his shoulder. ‘My First Cantor takes a dim view of murder.’
I stared up at him, dumfounded. For the life of me I couldn’t remember Kest ever striking me outside of a bout. So why now? Was it to make the point that even without his right hand, even without a sword, he could still take me down if he had to?
I decided to try and lighten the mood. ‘Hey, I’m not the one who wanted to kill Valiana back when we thought she was Patriana’s daughter.’
‘That’s true. You didn’t want to kill her.’ He paused a moment, then said, ‘All these years, Falcio, for all the danger, for all the horrors you’ve endured, you’ve never once had to choose between the King’s laws and your own sense of what was right.’ He glanced back at Filian, trotting towards us with a pathetically small bundle of kindling in his arms. ‘You can’t have it both ways this time. You’re going to have to decide whether to follow the law or save the people you love.’
I imagined that scale with Aline, Valiana, Ethalia and everyone I cared about on one side. The other side was empty. The Law. The King’s Dream: words with no more weight than the breath it took to utter them.
‘How do I choose?’
Kest chuckled, which was unusual for him. ‘If I knew the answer to that, I’d be the First Cantor.’
*
‘Do you require my assistance, First Cantor?’ Filian asked, clutching his bundle of sticks.
‘Why would I need your help?’
‘You appear to be lying in the snow. I thought you might be injured.’
As I rose to my feet, snow slid down the back of my neck, making me shudder. ‘Give me those,’ I said. I took the branches from him and set about making a fire – well, I set about doing all the things that eventually lead to a fire. I’ve never been any good at fires, so usually I cheat and use a fragment of amberlight, but I’d used it all up for our escape. I’d end up having to let Brasti do it, which inevitably meant enduring a lecture on the importance of basic woodcraft.
Filian was standing mute, his lips moving silently ever few seconds, as if he were rehearsing lines for a stage play. He was really getting on my nerves. ‘What is it you want to say?’ I asked curtly.
‘Do you . . . ?’
He hesitated – was he worried I might hit him? Oh, please, I thought. Give me an excuse.
But then he blurted out, ‘Do you think she’s still alive?’
I might well have struck him, or at least mocked his concern; I might possibly have listed all the people Trin had killed or had horribly murdered in the short time since I’d been unlucky enough to make her acquaintance, starting with a hapless Lord Caravaner who’d been in her way. But staring at that face which shared so many of the features of my dead King, I said instead, ‘I don’t know. The odds aren’t good, but she said it herself: she’s a survivor.’
He looked for a moment as if he might start bawling her name and praying to the Gods, then he visibly pulled himself together. ‘You really hate her, don’t you?’
He doesn’t know, I realised for the first time. He’s never met the woman I know, the one who’s come so close, so many times, to killing the people I care about.
‘Do you love her?’ I asked back. I needed to know his true feelings for her if I was to be able to gauge what kind of man he might become.
Filian’s cheeks turned an awkward sort of pink. ‘I know she’s done terrible things, if that’s what you’re asking. Neither she nor Patriana ever hid from me the ugly truths of politics and warfare.’
‘So how is it even possible that you love her? She’s not just conspired against her own people – hells, she’s killed a fair number of them!’
‘Can I ask you a question?’ He didn’t wait for permission. ‘How many men have you killed, First Cantor?’ Before I could reply, he said quickly, ‘Let me ask it differently. Do you think you—?’
‘There’s a difference between killing a man in battle and murdering him in cold blood.’ My voice was firm – and no, the irony of my reply wasn’t lost on me.
The little smile on his face made me want to punch him. ‘You think this is funny?’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said hastily, backing away, ‘it’s just that Duchess Patriana used to say that when a man kills, it is always “in battle” but when a woman kills, it’s always murder.’
His attempts at cleverness were intensely irritating – then an odd thought occurred to me: I wonder if this is how people feel around me? I ignored it.
‘Patriana killed your father, you know. Did she tell you that when she was filling your head with clever platitudes?’
‘I was nine years old when she and the Dukes overthrew my father.’
Nine years old. It had been six years since the King’s death, which would make Filian fifteen now, a year older than Aline. So was this true, or simply a carefully practised lie to establish his age for me, as he surely would do for the Dukes when he presented himself before them? If I ever gave him the chance.
I think the boy must have interpreted my scowl as a response to his casual mention of overthrowing his father. ‘It was a coup,’ he said quickly. ‘A change in government.’
‘Well, that does sound much nicer than conspiracy, insurrection and beheading, doesn’t it.’
Filian set down his sticks. ‘Have you read the histories of the Kings of Tristia?’
‘Several different versions – I used to read a chapter when I needed something boring
enough to put me to sleep.’
‘You must never have got past the first few pages, then.’ He sounded surprised. ‘Every chapter ends in blood and violence – few monarchs ever died of natural causes.’
‘That doesn’t speak well of your future, then, does it?’
He took in a breath and stood a little straighter. ‘I am prepared to pay the price a King must pay when the time comes.’
I found his veneer of nobility both pretentious and cloying. ‘Did Patriana teach you that? One of her lectures on how to pretend to be a well-behaved little monarch?’
‘You mock her and me but she raised me in the ways of kingship.’
It was hard not to shudder at the thought of Patriana’s notion of raising a King. ‘Care to share some of her lessons with me? Or am I too lowborn to understand?’
He looked thoughtfully at the snowy ground for a moment. ‘When I was seven years old she brought me a puppy. He was a Sharpney. Have you ever seen one?’
I had, though at first I couldn’t remember where – then it came to me: Rijou, at the end of Ganath Kalila, the Blood Week. Mixer was his name; he’d belonged to that little tyrant Venger and his group of miscreants. Mixer had raced to grab one of my gold buttons from the ground at the Rock of Rijou. I chuckled: technically speaking, that dog was one of my jurors.
Filian mistook the cause of my laughter. ‘I know,’ he said ruefully, ‘it sounds utterly banal – a boy given a puppy to look after. But Duchess Patriana told me it was part of my training.’ He looked wistfully up at the sky. ‘Gazer.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘The pup. I called him Gazer – Stargazer – because I’d always find him outside the cottage at night staring up at the stars as though they were something he could chase.’ He sighed. ‘I loved that dog.’
I could guess where this story was going. In Avares they were reputed to give puppies or kittens to children to raise and love until the child was old enough to begin training as a warrior. ‘Is this the part where you tell me she made you slit the dog’s throat to prove how strong you were?’
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